Holded, an ‘ERP for small businesses’, raised €15M from Elaia, Lakestar, Nauta and SeedRocket – TechCrunch

Holded, a platform billing itself as an ERP aimed at small businesses, has raised a €15 million Series B funding round led by VC firm Elaia, together with Lakestar, Nauta Capital and SeedRocket.

Holded says it gives small businesses access to ERP-style planning across invoicing, accounting, sales, project management, inventory management and HR, in one dashboard. It’s attracted 80,000 customers to date. The money will be used to grow its technology and business teams. Its product is also used by accounting firms to digitalize their businesses and become value-added resellers. It will now open an office in Paris.

In a statement, co-founder Javi Fondevila said: “We knew the idea of centralizing all your business in one place was very powerful and the only reason why nobody did it before was that it’s extremely hard to design an intuitive self-serve ERP for Small Businesses.”

Pauline Roux, partner at Elaia, said: “We strongly believe that the opportunity ahead to build solutions for small businesses is massive. In the case of ERPs, solutions tend to be very complex modular products and, as Small Businesses don’t have independent departments, they need an integrated and very intuitive solution. Most of the new ERPs are just doing the same as the incumbents but in the cloud. Holded developed the first ERP we have seen without modules, long implementation times or consultants needed, they’ve really changed the whole experience.”

The ERP startup space is heating up. In January, Xentral, a German startup that develops enterprise resource planning software covering a variety of back-office functions for the average online small business, picked up a Series A of $20 million.